257 essays1,087 funds measuredindependent · not paid by any fund or issuer we cover
Independent ETF & portfolio research
The fact sheet gives you a number. We compute the one it left out.
A fund tells you it holds 500 stocks, costs 0.03%, and returned so much over five
years. None of those answer the question you actually have. Every article here
recomputes the figure that does — and shows the working, so you can check it.
137 US funds name the banks on the other side of their swaps in Form N-PORT. Grouped by how much of the fund is swaps, the pattern inverts what you would expect — funds whose swap book is 100% of net assets or more use 6.4 banks on average and give the largest 42.2% of it; funds whose swap book is under 5% of net assets use 2.1 banks and give the largest 84.6%. VOO's swap counterparty is 95.9% Bank of America. It is also 0.2% of VOO.
742 US funds lend $175.6 billion of stock and name every borrower in their SEC filings. Read the other way round — by borrower rather than by fund — 116 legal entities appear, and once they are grouped into the firms behind them five names hold 64.3% of everything lent. JP Morgan alone is 20.6%. Nobody publishes this; it is in Item B.4.a of every Form N-PORT.
Every comparable US-registered fund pooled by the issuer country it filed, quarter by quarter since 2019 — 962 funds and $16.04 trillion at 2026 Q2, of which the United States is 79.44%. Taiwan and Korea have doubled their share in three quarters while Japan, Hong Kong, France, Germany and the UK all gave ground. World through ETFs, episode 4.
Two thirds of the equity index funds with a 2019 SEC filing on record behave like fewer holdings today than they did then, and the median fund's ten largest positions went from 27.2% to 35.2%. The sharpest concentration is not in the S&P 500 — it is in emerging-market funds, where the typical fund lost about 70% of its effective holdings. Bond funds moved the opposite way. Measured from 640 funds across 28 quarters of Form N-PORT.
The S&P 500 ETF and the Vanguard Growth ETF compared from their SEC Form N-PORT filings for 30 June 2026 — IVV holds 507 stocks and behaves like 51.5 equal ones, VUG holds 151 and behaves like 19.8. They share 57% of their weight, and only 3.55% of VUG is in companies IVV does not already hold.
The Vanguard Total World Stock ETF holds 10,057 stocks in 48 countries, and the United States is 61.97% of it as of its SEC Form N-PORT filing for 30 April 2026. Seven years of filings show that share rising from 52.17% in 2019 to a peak of 65.24% in January 2025, then falling back. What rose with it: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea. What gave way: Japan and the United Kingdom. World through ETFs, episode 3.
The Nasdaq-100 ETF and the S&P technology sector ETF compared from their SEC Form N-PORT filings for 30 June 2026 — QQQ holds 103 stocks and behaves like 34.1 equal ones, XLK holds 77 and behaves like 16.3. They share 57% of their weight; held together they behave like 24.8, fewer than QQQ alone. What each one holds that the other does not.
What the three large small-cap index ETFs held according to their SEC Form N-PORT filings for May–June 2026 — IWM 2,016 stocks behaving like 840 equal holdings, VTWO (same Russell 2000 index, one month earlier) 1,954 behaving like 514, IJR (S&P 600) 655 behaving like 356 — and why two funds on the same index read so differently: the Russell reconstitution every June. Country split, the collateral note, and what IWM and IJR share (47%).
The iShares Russell 2000 ETF had $13.3 billion of its stock out on loan at 30 June 2026, 16% of the fund, and JP Morgan Securities held $10.9 billion of it — 82.3%, against 21.3% in March 2025. Read from Item B.4.a of the fund's own SEC Form N-PORT filings, with the same measure for IJR, IJH, IVV, IWF and 737 other lending funds.
Where a dollar in the large US emerging-markets ETFs sits, from their SEC Form N-PORT filings for April–June 2026 — Taiwan 25.8% of IEMG and 28.9% of VWO, Korea 22.1% of IEMG and zero of VWO, India 11.9% and 16.2%, China 19% and 27% once its three country codes are added together. TSMC alone is one dollar in eight. How the map has moved since 2019, when China was a third and Taiwan an eighth. World through ETFs, episode 2.